‘Clean coal’ touted by Trump gets a bipartisan boost in spending bill

The spending bill that Congress passed and President Trump signed Friday would extend and expand a tax credit supporting a long-elusive and expensive technology that captures carbon emissions from power plants and stores it underground.

The tax credit, created in 2008, was extended for 12 years, increasing the potential for broader deployment of carbon capture technology.

“The tax credit can be used for industrial and power use of carbon capture,” said Jeremy Harrell, policy director of ClearPath Foundation. “By lowering the benchmark of what the credit can be used for, it could allow investments in potentially the next Petra Nova plant, these first of a kind carbon projects for gas, industrial and coal use.”

“I expect, and sincerely hope, that this bill will bring large investments into the carbon capture and carbon-to-value industries, which will help America meet its emissions reductions goals with more speed and less cost,” said Julio Friedmann, the CEO of Carbon Wrangler and former principal deputy assistant of the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy.